Put together a list of dubious bottles to be culled, which included a handful of bottles of Merryvale Cabernets and blends from 1998-2001, which were kept in a steel lockbox my father's un-air-conditioned San Francisco garage (on the Bay side, not the ocean side) until his death in 2014, and since then in temp-controlled storage in Chicago. For a while in the 90s-early 00s, Merryvale was always the last stop on family wine-tasting outings to Napa, because their old-school, belly-up-to-the-bar tasting room stayed open late enough that we could do a final round there and then walk directly across the parking lot to Tra Vigne. My dad liked the wine enough to join the club, and since no one in my family was drinking Dominus or Opus One (or Heitz or Montelena, for that matter), the Merryvale Profile was as close as I got to "prestige" Napa bottlings.
So, with a Musar at the ready as backup, we opened this Merryvale 1999 Napa Valley "Profile," roughly 60-35 CS/Merlot with a bit of CF and PV thrown in. Surprise surprise, it’s in very good shape. Stood it up for 24 hrs and then decanted it gently, and found good color, ruby to garnet, from the get-go. It took about half an hour to show anything from behind some remaining tannin, and the first signals are faint, so that at first, I thought it would be a drinkable shadow at best. But by two hours in, it became a different wine, with a lively nose that combined a bit of black cherry and currant fruit with tobacco and, ultimately, a lot of olive. The tapenade aroma became dominant but not overwhelming, and each small pour seemed more exuberant and a little more complex than the one before it. Paired nicely with Sami Tamimi’s oven-roasted lamb shawarma with yogurt tahini sauce and a tomato-cucumber salad. Makes me feel pretty good about going passive in the new cellar (but summer will be the test).
Meanwhile, having bailed on Corison and Ridge, and having come back here (as well as mostly lurking on WB), I'm also having fun trying new-to-me producers. From a mixed case: Sabelli-Frisch 2022 Clements Hills White Zinfandel, Mariedam Vineyard Fun wine. Very pale rosé, fresh peach and cherry fruit, slightly saline and peppery finish. This has surprising body for its 12% abv, and just enough acidity to be energetic, though this is not a rosé I would age. We had this with a pasta puttanesca and it stood up to the strong flavors well. Part of the pleasure of the wine is, of course, the giggly scandalousness of drinking a “white Zinfandel,” but it’s only a small part: this is tasty no matter what it’s called. Adam Frisch seems to do a lot with Lodi grapes, which I started exploring a decade ago by purchasing a couple of vintages of the "Lodi Zin" sampler pack, in which six different producers made wines from mostly old-vine plantings in different parts of Lodi, keeping certain parameters (oak treatment, etc.) fixed in order to try to get the wines to show the sites rather than the winemakers' different styles. Not all of those wines were good, but some of them were terrific, and now Lodi has a whole complex of sub-AVAs to explore, though it's not getting any cooler.